Chapter 3: First Blood
[Bermondsey, London — March 15, 2008, 11:47 PM]
Kevin killed the headlights a block from the target.
The Audi rolled to a stop on a side street lined with skip bins and locked gates. Millbrook & Associates occupied the third floor of a converted warehouse—red brick, black fire escape, the kind of building that had been something industrial before someone decided Bermondsey was up-and-coming. The ground floor was a design studio. Second floor, empty. Third floor, lawyers who helped people hide money from other people.
James checked his watch. 11:47. Danny's smoke break at midnight. Thirteen minutes.
"Run it back," he said.
Kevin exhaled through his nose. They'd been over it four times during the day's recon—walking the perimeter, timing the foot traffic, noting the camera angles. Kevin clearly thought the repetition was pointless. Kevin was wrong.
"Service entrance, round back. Danny props it at midnight. Up the stairs to three. Turn left. Fourth door—partner's office, Millbrook on the nameplate. Cabinet behind the desk, second drawer. Financial records for a company called Hastings Holdings. Grab the lot. Back out the way we came. Danny closes up. Nobody knows."
"Time inside?"
"Twenty minutes, tops."
"Make it fifteen."
Kevin nodded. His knee bounced against the steering column. Nervous energy bleeding out through his joints.
James was calmer than he had any right to be. His pulse ran steady—seventy, maybe seventy-five. The fear was there, banked low in his gut like coals, but it wasn't paralysing. It was fuel. The same mechanism that had carried him through hundred-hour weeks and boardroom ambushes and the Greenfield pitch that should have been a disaster. Pressure sharpened him. It always had. Apparently that particular trait had survived the transition between bodies. Between lives.
At 11:58, they moved.
The street behind the building was empty. A cat watched them from a windowsill, unimpressed. The service entrance was a steel door set into an alcove, partially hidden by a rubbish skip. At 12:01, the door clicked open from inside. Danny—a heavyset man in a security uniform—poked his head out, scanned the alley, spotted them. He didn't speak. Just propped the door with a brick and walked toward the corner, already pulling a cigarette from his breast pocket.
Kevin went first. He moved well—quick, light on his feet, clearly practised. The corridor inside was dark. Emergency lighting threw green rectangles on the floor every ten metres. Stairwell door, propped open. Up. Their footsteps echoed in the concrete shaft despite their efforts to stay quiet.
Second floor. James' breathing stayed even but his hands wanted to shake. He pressed them flat against his thighs as they climbed.
Third floor. Kevin produced a small toolkit from his jacket—picks, tension wrenches, a penlight clamped between his teeth. The stairwell door to the third-floor corridor was locked. Kevin worked it in under thirty seconds. Professional. Whatever else Kevin was—nervous, easily frightened, dependent—his hands knew this particular language.
The corridor beyond was carpeted. Quiet. Millbrook & Associates announced itself in brass letters on a glass door. Kevin bypassed that too. Inside: reception area, then a hallway with four offices. They moved past framed diplomas and potted plants that someone watered on Tuesdays.
Fourth door. R. Millbrook, Senior Partner. Kevin picked it. The door swung inward on oiled hinges.
The office smelled like leather and old paper. A mahogany desk dominated the centre, flanked by bookshelves packed with legal volumes nobody had read since law school. James crossed to the desk. Behind it, a filing cabinet—four drawers, grey steel, combination lock.
He tried the handle. Locked. Obviously.
"Kevin."
Kevin was already there, penlight between his teeth, fingers working the dial. Click. Click. The tumblers were basic—office security, not a vault. The drawer slid open.
Hanging files, colour-coded. Green tabs for client names. James rifled through them. Davidson. Foster. Grant. Hastings Holdings—there. A thick manila folder, half an inch of paper. He pulled it, flipped it open. Financial statements, bank transfers, internal memos. Enough to ruin someone's career and possibly their freedom.
He tucked the folder inside his jacket. Checked his watch. 12:09. Six minutes inside. Under budget.
"Done. Let's—"
Footsteps.
They both froze. The sound came from the corridor—measured, deliberate, rubber soles on carpet. Getting closer. A torch beam swept under the office door, left to right.
Kevin's face drained of colour. His mouth opened. James clamped a hand over it and pulled him behind the desk.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Through the frosted glass panel: a silhouette. Broad shoulders. Uniform. Not Danny. This guard was taller, thinner, standing perfectly still on the other side of the glass.
James' mind processed the variables in rapid succession. New hire. Night rotation change. Danny didn't know or didn't mention it. One guard becomes two and the whole plan folds.
A radio crackled. The guard muttered something—James caught "third floor" and "clear" and nothing else. The torch beam swept the glass again.
The door handle turned.
James was on his feet before the decision fully formed. The door swung inward and the guard stepped through—young, maybe twenty-five, startled by the dark office—and James was already moving. Closing distance. Three steps.
The guard's hand went for his radio. James' hand got there first.
Something happened. Something his body knew and his brain didn't. His left hand knocked the radio sideways. His right came up under the guard's arm, redirecting the torch, and then his knee found the man's thigh—not the groin, the outside of the thigh, dead-legging the muscle. The guard buckled. James caught the radio as it fell, pushed the man off-balance, and drove him backward into the doorframe.
The guard hit the frame hard. Grunted. Swung a fist that James ducked—ducked perfectly, his body dropping under the arc with a fluidity that didn't belong to a management consultant from Boston. Muscle memory. The original Moriarty had trained this body, drilled it, beaten fighting technique into the bones and tendons until it became reflex.
James used that reflex. He stepped inside the guard's reach, hooked his ankle, and took him to the floor. The carpet muffled the impact. The guard tried to shout. James pressed his forearm across the man's throat—not crushing, controlling. Enough weight to make breathing difficult, not enough to damage.
"Stop," he said. Quiet. The Irish voice flat and cold.
The guard stopped.
Kevin appeared with zip ties. His hands shook badly but he cinched the guard's wrists behind his back, then his ankles. A strip of duct tape from his toolkit over the mouth. The whole process took forty seconds.
The guard stared up at them. Young. Frightened. His eyes tracked between James and Kevin, trying to memorise features. The corridor's emergency lighting was behind them—their faces were shadows.
"Don't move for thirty minutes," James said. "Someone will find you in the morning."
They left him on the floor of R. Millbrook's office.
---
The stairwell was too loud. Every footfall amplified by concrete walls. Kevin kept glancing over his shoulder like the guard might have chewed through zip ties and duct tape and materialised behind them.
Ground floor. Corridor. Service door. The brick was still in place. The alley was cold and dark and empty.
They walked. Didn't run. Running attracted attention at half past midnight. Two men walking—that was nothing. That was a night out, going home.
The Audi was where they'd left it. Kevin fumbled the keys. Dropped them. Picked them up. Got behind the wheel. His hands gripped the steering wheel at ten and two, knuckles bone-white.
James sat in the passenger seat. Closed the door. The interior of the car was warm and quiet and smelled like Kevin's pine air freshener.
His hands began to shake.
Not a tremor—a full, visible, uncontrollable vibration that started in his fingers and climbed his wrists and wouldn't stop. He pressed them between his knees. The documents crinkled inside his jacket, pressed against his ribs.
He'd done it. Broken into a building. Fought a man. Won. His first crime, committed in a body that wasn't his, in a city he didn't know, in a world that shouldn't exist.
Kevin started the engine. Pulled out of the side street. The headlights came on and Bermondsey scrolled past, ordinary and indifferent.
Three blocks. Five. The tremor subsided by degrees. His breathing settled from ragged to deep to normal. The guard's face kept flashing behind his eyes—young, scared, trying to do his job. James hadn't killed him. Hadn't wanted to. That mattered. He needed it to matter.
"That was..." Kevin began. Stopped. Started again. "That was different."
"Different how?"
"You. Before, you would've—" Kevin swallowed. "You wouldn't have just tied him up. Before."
The implication landed like a stone in still water. The original Moriarty. Volatile, unpredictable, violent. The kind of man who'd hurt a security guard for the inconvenience of existing.
"Things change," James said.
Kevin drove in silence for a while. Then, quietly: "He didn't see our faces. The lighting was behind us the whole time."
"I know."
"And Danny will wipe the access log. He always does."
"Good."
More silence. Southwark materialised ahead, its tower blocks cutting black shapes against the sodium-lit sky.
"Where do we deliver the documents?" James asked. He kept his voice even. Casual. Like he was confirming rather than asking.
Kevin glanced at him. "You— the client contact? It's the drop box at Marylebone. Locker forty-seven. Same as last—"
"Walk me through the full delivery process. Every step."
The glance became a stare. "Jim, you've done this—"
"Walk me through it."
Kevin's mouth worked. The confusion was back—that dog-with-a-new-owner look. But he complied. Because that's what Kevin did. He complied.
"Right. So. The drop box is at Marylebone station. Public lockers, pay-by-the-hour. Number forty-seven. We put the documents in, lock it, text the combination to the client from a clean phone. Client picks up, confirms the contents, transfers the fifteen grand to the— to your account. The Cayman one."
James filed every word. Cayman account. Drop box system. Client contact via text. Sloppy. Traceable. Improvable. Everything was improvable.
"And the client. What's his name?"
"Harwell. David Harwell. Runs some kind of investment thing. You met him at the Clarendon, remember? Two weeks ago."
"Remind me what he looks like."
Kevin described Harwell—fifties, silver hair, expensive suits, drank whiskey sours. James committed the details to memory. Another piece of the puzzle. Another thread in a web he hadn't built but now owned.
The Audi pulled up outside his building. Engine idling. Kevin's fingers drummed the wheel.
"Jim?"
"Yeah."
"The thing with the guard. The way you moved. That was..." He searched for the word. "Clean. Faster than before. Like you'd been practising."
James opened the car door. The night air bit his face. His knuckles ached—bruised from the guard's radio, a dull pulse that matched his heartbeat.
"Get some sleep, Kevin. Tomorrow we deliver the documents, collect the money, and then I want that full accounting I asked for. Every client, every contact. The whole picture."
He didn't wait for an answer. Closed the door. Walked toward the building entrance.
Behind him, the Audi sat for a long moment before Kevin drove away.
Inside, the stairwell was quiet. Four flights up. Three locks on the door. The flat closed around him—small, cold, someone else's life stacked on every surface.
James set the stolen documents on the kitchen counter. Ran the tap. Splashed water on his face. The mirror over the sink showed Moriarty's face, flushed, alive, dark eyes carrying something that hadn't been there twelve hours ago.
Purpose.
He dried his hands on a tea towel that smelled like someone else's detergent. His knuckles throbbed. His body hummed with the aftermath of adrenaline—that strange, clean exhaustion that came after surviving something that should have broken you.
Tomorrow. Deliver the documents. Meet the client. Start mapping the full operation. Then restructure from the ground up—security, communication, planning. Turn a sloppy small-time outfit into something that deserved the name Moriarty.
He poured a glass of water. Drank it standing at the counter. London hummed through the walls, a low electric murmur that never fully stopped.
The burner phone buzzed. Kevin.
"Should I bring breakfast again tomorrow?"
James typed back: "Same place. And Kevin—bring a notebook."
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